How Proactive Surge Protection Keeps Your Business Running

Preventative measures help people protect themselves from future harm in many ways. Doctors can provide vaccinations against future illness, for example, and auto mechanics can perform regular maintenance to ensure that your car does not suffer a major breakdown. We recognize that spending a modest amount of time and money to perform preventative procedures can stop much larger problems and costs from occurring in the future.

Proactive measures can help to detect future problems that are currently hidden or uncertain, and would not be discovered without consistent preventative maintenance. Not only can proactive measures prevent early failure and future problems, they also help find and stop problems that would not have been known until they caused a catastrophe. This is just as true in business as it is in personal health and property maintenance, particularly when it comes to surge protection procedures.

However, businesses often see proactive measures as an unnecessary expenditure. If they believe the risk is low, they may see the cost of consistent maintenance or proactive, preventative measures as a problem for their bottom line. Having not experienced any problems in the past, they often believe that they may not need preventive action. Many businesses do not believe they need to protect their facilities from surges, in most cases because they operate in an area with little occurrence of lightning. Unfortunately, this can have catastrophic consequences.

It is important to understand that your business may be more at risk from surges than you believe. Some experts estimate that between 60 and 80 percent of all power surges are caused by events or problems within the same building as the electronic systems they are affecting. These experts point out that within commercial buildings, there are usually many devices with powerful motors that switch on and off during a day, including elevators, refrigerators, pumps, and similar equipment. The truth is that surges can be the result of something as simple as your air conditioner cycling on or off. They can also be a result of electrical power plants connecting or disconnecting from the grid, which happens frequently as power needs change during the course of a day. The wear and tear from these frequent, smaller surges can degrade your devices over time, reducing their lifespan.

In addition to protecting your investments, proactive surge protection can act as any other preventative measure would—incurring a smaller cost initially (such as a surge protector sacrificing to prevent surge damage) to avoid the much larger expense of damaged or destroyed equipment. As surges are impossible to predict and can cause massive damage to any device on your power grid or IP network, it is an essential measure to reduce these risks. Considering a proactive approach to the protection for your devices can be a cost-effective measure that ensures your business can keep running even in the event of a damaging power surge.

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